I recently finished my second read-through of Anti-Oedipus, this time as part of a reading group working through it week by week over half a year. The first time I read it I understood very little, and of course looking back I understood even less than I knew, having missed the references to pretty much everyone except Nietzsche and finding the premise, at least as far as I could grasp it, rather bleak.

Nevertheless, I don’t regret the confusing slog that was my first read, and it may have been necessary. While my eyes may have glazed over for pages at a time, the rhythm of the text, the intensity of it, and many of lines of flight traversing it left an impression on me that stuck. It left behind a map, however roughly sketched, of loose ends I could pick up and follow, backwards, forwards and horizontally, to other authors, other horizons. Exhausted and happy to finally be at the end as I was, I knew this text wasn’t done with me.

This read-through, slower though by no means “close”, I feel I have developed beyond impression to the beginnings of comprehension; at least enough to have something to reflect on. I would not dream, at this point in my journey with Deleuze and Guattari, of entertaining pretensions of being able to explain this text to anyone, especially myself; however, I think one way in which I could provide something of use is in exploring this theme: why bother with this dense, obscurantist, provocative, delirious, even ridiculous text? For that matter, why bother with Oedipus at all? Haven’t we had done with Freud, with the death of god and the father already a hundred times over? Doesn’t it smell a bit funny, a bit Oedipal and mythological, to return once again to the Ur-text to have done again, but one hopes this time once and for all, with daddy?

This was a theme that emerged throughout our discussions in the reading group, and with me personally in both my reads of this text, for a few reasons. The first being that Freud often seems, paradoxically, at once everywhere, and thoroughly outdated; that sexual repression seems both a relic, and all anyone ever talks about; that the therapeutic situation has long since passed from representation to the neurological and the chemical; that functionalism has long since won the day without the aid of schizoanalysis, though in a thoroughly bourgeois-capitalist fashion. The problem is surely not, for the average young person trying to find a place in the order of desiring-production, that they are being Oedipalized; if by some miracle or great personal sacrifice they are able to afford therapy, it is almost certainly not a kind that sings in so many words the song of Oedipus; far more likely, some variation of: “now let’s see, why aren’t you able to work? why are you so tired, you pitiable a creature that can barely move from the bed to the desk to the couch, what’s wrong with you? let’s tinker a bit and see if we can’t fix you up, you and I.” From this naive reading, which is not really a reading at all but the exact movement described by schizoanalysis, Oedipus would seem almost a relief! At least in such a scheme there are persons, there is a Great Other who’s name we can bless while the thousand tiny hammer blows fall all over our bodies! What need have we for a functionalism, we who live it daily and can hardly bear it?

So, while I wouldn’t claim to have knowledge, or a reading, or anything novel to say about any of this, I feel I can at least begin to answer, for the benefit of those quicker on the uptake than I, a basic question: why read this text? I will perhaps head off a few bad readings, sketch out a few lines of flight, and invite you to see where they lead, should you dare. I expect I am far from done with this text, and that its insights will remain fresh and revolutionary for just a few moments more.

I’m going to lay out a few (to be sure) basic, but also common, misunderstandings and vulgarizations of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that I had absorbed, mostly from the accelerationism sphere and twitter deleuzians (of which I am, regrettably, one I suppose 😑); and to head off a few obvious objections which are well explored in the text. As they themselves admit, “in all probability there are far more serious reproaches to be made, which we haven’t even thought of,” but don’t allow these objections to be your reason not to explore this rich and quite enjoyable text.

Let’s begin.

Who gives a fuck about Freud?⌗

I am far from being in a position to give an accurate survey of the field of mental health, of what treatments are available to the working class, and of the influence or lack thereof of Freud and the unconscious theater on the practice. So I will speak only from my own experience, and you may take from it what is of use to you. While reading this text, and while beginning my adventure into psychoanalysis, and even as far back as beginning to feel Nietzsche vibrating in my bones, the question has nagged at me: “What, again?” The dreadful cliche of modernity, the ape that mocks even as one discovers for the first time the death of god: “You fool, to hear so late the toll that has long since ceased to ring!” One experiences them simultaneously: the discovery and the shrug, the profundity and the banality, the secret laid unbearably obvious; the Last Man’s blink. Always already all too human, mad with impatience to be empty, always finding oneself an imperfectly ordinary, dreadfully contingent, disgustingly particular modern, watching the hammers fall to what avail? Oh, the temptation to short circuit, to pretend to know in advance “it’s your father, your mother, Oedipus!”, to archly respond in your windowless cell “What Oedipus? Myth, theater? Pah.” and fall silent. Breakdown, catatonia. It recalls a shiver, though it cannot go so far as to actually elicit one.

Read Freud. Read D&G! Enough with this factious knowing in advance. Freud would have been worthless if he had actually been this Last Man, this “public intellectual” who can only remind everyone that they are castrated. It is only within representation and the theater that the Last Man can stare blankly. Freud knows, to his eternal credit, that one must actually do the work, that the unconscious is not only a structure, but irreducible, non-communicating fragments, intensities that do not signify anything, though he betrays this knowledge. The Freud opposed by D&G is not the one analyzing dreams, the one who found again and again in his bourgeois hysterics Oedipus; D&G tell us repeatedly that Oedipus exists, that the structure is real! And if one finds oneself turning round and round in the Last Man’s cell, nothing could be more necessary than to traverse the edges of the triangle, to make them vibrate until they burst. Though perhaps one may still be permitted a laugh that, tragic or not, absurd or not, one still has two arms and two feet and a boulder for company, one is yet another orphan mourning yet another father that never was. Allow yourself that. But as you laugh, rise!

Oedipus, far from being an outdated idealism superseded by functionalism, by schizophrenic desiring-production, is everywhere, and all the more castrating for having been “left behind”!

[T]he theater raises the familial relation to the condition of a universal metaphoric structural relation, whence the imaginary place and interplay of persons derives; and inversely, the theater forces the play and the working of machines into the wings, behind a limit that has become impassible (exactly as in fantasy the machines are there, but behind the wall). In short, the displaced limit no longer passes between objective representation and desiring-production, but between the two poles of subjective representation, as infinite imaginary representation, and as finite structural representation. Thereafter it is possible to oppose these two aspects to each other, the imaginary variations that tend toward the night of the indeterminate or the nondifferentiated, and the symbolic invariant that traces the path of the differentiations: the same thing is found all over, following a rule of inverse relation, or double bind. All of production is conducted into the double impasse of subjective representation. Oedipus can always be consigned to the Imaginary, but no matter, it will be encountered again, stronger and more whole, more lacking and triumphant by the very fact that it is lacking, it will be encountered again in its entirety in symbolic castration. And it’s a sure thing that structure affords us no means for escaping familialism; on the contrary, it adds another turn, it attributes a universal metaphoric value to the family at the very moment it has lost its objective literal values. Psychoanalysis makes its ambition clear: to relieve the waning family, to replace the broken-down familial bed with the psychoanalyst’s couch, to make it so that the “analytic situation” is incestuous in its essence, so that it is its own proof or voucher, on a par with Reality.

In the final analysis that is indeed what is at issue, as Octave Mannoni shows: how can belief continue after repudiation, how can we continue to be pious? We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that proceeded by way of objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert is growing: the old father is dead, the territorial father, and the son too, the despot Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that revolve within the infinite subjective representation. We will muster all our strength so as to believe in these images, from the depths of a structure that governs our relationships with them and our identifications as so many effects of a symbolic signifier. The “good identification.” We are all Archie Bunker at the theater, shouting out before Oedipus: there’s my kind of guy, there’s my kind of guy! Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken up again as shadows projected on a stage. The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations. What a perverse operation psychoanalysis is, where this neoidealism, this rehabilitated cult of castration, this ideology of lack culminates: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! In truth, they don’t know what they are doing, nor what mechanism of repression they are fostering, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an analyst’s consulting room without at least being aware that everything has been played out in advance: Oedipus and castration, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the great lesson of the inadequacy of being or of dispossession. Psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a reterritorialization, a retimbering of modern man on the “rock” of castration.

The castration is the break between desiring-production and social production, not only Oedipus-the-myth, which is much too historical, much too contingent to serve as a universal adequate to the reterrorializations of capitalism. It is the feeling of learned helplessness, the defeated-in-advance of the Last Man. It couldn’t be more relevant, precisely because it has become obscure: “Fewer and fewer people believe in all this but it makes no difference, since capitalism is like the Christian religion, it lives precisely from a lack of belief, it does not need it—a motley painting of all that has been believed.”

I’m not a schizophrenic, I just larp one on twitter⌗

Another misapprehension I maintained until pretty late in my second read-through is the simplistic opposition “deterritorialization good, reterritorialization bad”, “schizophrenic good, paranoiac bad.” To be sure, the paranoiac pole is the fascist, reactionary pole, while the schizo the creative and revolutionary pole, but D&G make it abundantly clear that they are inseparable parts of the same process (emphasis mine):

We cannot however allow the difference in regime to make us forget the identity in nature. There are fundamentally two poles; but we would not be satisfied if we had to present them merely as the duality of the molar formations and the molecular formations, since there is not one molecular formation that is not by itself an investment of a molar formation. There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring-machines that inhabit them on a small scale. Nor is there any molecular chain that does not intercept and reproduce whole blocks of molar code or axiomatic, nor any such blocks that do not contain or seal off fragments of molecular chain. A sequence of desire is extended by a social series, or a social machine contains desiring-machine parts within its workings. The desiring micromultiplicities are no less collective than the large social aggregates; they are strictly inseparable and constitute one and the same process of production. From this point of view, the duality of the poles passes less between the molar and the molecular than to the interior of the molar social investments, since in any case the molecular formations are such investments. That is why our terminology concerning the two poles has necessarily varied. At times we contrasted the molar and the molecular as the paranoiac, signifying, and structured lines of integration, and the schizophrenic, machinic, and dispersed lines of escape; or again as the staking out of the perverse reterritorializations, and as the movement of the schizophrenic deterritorializations. At other times, on the contrary, we contrasted them as the two major types of equally social investments: the one sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a reactionary or fascist tendency; the other nomadic and polyvocal, and of a revolutionary tendency. In fact, in the schizoid declaration—“I am of a race inferior for all eternity,” “I am a beast, a black,” “We are all German Jews”—the historico-social field is no less invested than in the paranoiac formula: “I am one of your kind, from the same place as you, I am a pure Aryan, of a superior race for all time.”

From the viewpoint of the unconscious libidinal investment, all the oscillations from one formula to the other are possible. How can this be? How can the schizophrenic escape, with its molecular dispersion, form an investment that is as strong and determined as the other? And why ate there two types of social investment that correspond to the two poles? The answer is that everywhere there exist the molecular and the molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which varies only according to the two directions of subordination, according as the molecular phenomena are subordinated to the large aggregates, or on the contrary subordinate them to themselves. At one of the poles the large aggregates, the large forms of gregariousness, do not prevent the flight that carries them along, and they oppose to it the paranoiac investment only as an “escape in advance of the escape.” But at the other pole, the schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at it and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the conversion of schizophrenia as a process into an effectively revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first of all the one who can no longer bear “all that”: money, the stock market, the death forces, Nijinsky said—values, morals, homelands, religions, and private certi-tudes? There is a whole world of difference between the schizo and the revolutionary: the difference between the one who escapes, and the one who knows how to make what he is escaping escape, collapsing a filthy drainage pipe, causing a deluge to break loose, liberating a flow, resecting a schiz. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution. To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same time? The choice is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counterescape that motivates all the conformist, reactionary, and fascisizing investments, and the schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary investment. Maurice Blanchot speaks admirably of this revolutionary escape, this fall that must be thought and carried out as the most positive of events: “What is this escape? The word is poorly chosen to please. Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great immobile movement. An escape in advance of the escape. [Consider the example of one of these men] who, having had the revelation of the mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false pretenses of residence. First he tries to take this movement as his own. He would like to personally withdraw. He lives on the fringe… [But] perhaps that is what the fall is, that it can no longer be a personal destiny, but the common lot.”

That bit about being a “race inferior for all eternity”, is, to me, the best in the whole text at communicating what being a revolutionary means in this schema. Capitalism is always offering to make a deal with the exploited masses, the “weakest links” in the system, to provide them an axiom (for example, gay marriage: we’ll recognize you as legitimate, so long as you make your aberration reflect bourgeois morality, and so long as you’ll attach your interest to anti-production; lockheed-martin homosexuality). Being a revolutionary means flying straight past all legitimacy, it means rejecting all ideological justifications for becoming an administrator of capital-money, justifications which are just the desiccated remains of Protestant Good Stewardship; it means struggling and living and dying not as a “representation” of a higher, or an inner, realm (which is then castrated as “merely” fantasy), but living-for-itself: “At the deepest level of society there is delirium, because delirium is the investment of a socius as such, beyond goals.”

Why are you, as a man, fighting for your servitude as if it were your salvation?⌗

This delirium that is desire, this irrational investment of any and all production, leads us to the central question of the text, a question I failed to answer satisfactorily on my first read: “How is it that, knowing full well what they are doing, people will choose, for themselves and their children, punishment, oppression, and terror?” The answer is at once obvious and obscure; at once the “common sense” retort to vulgar Marxism, and the intolerable fissure that keeps Plato up at night. To truly grapple with its implications threatens to drag one down into Anxiety (though somehow, Deleuze and Guattari report it with a Spinozist equanimity):

It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie—since love drives us on. The manifest syntheses are merely the preconscious indicators of a degree of development; the apparent interests and aims are merely the preconscious exponents of a social full body. As Klossowski says in his profound commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power is identical with the violence it exerts by its very absurdity, but it can exert this violence only by assigning itself aims and meanings in which even the most enslaved elements participate: “The sovereign formations will have no other purpose than that of masking the absence of a purpose or a meaning of their sovereignty by means of the organic purpose of their creation,” and the purpose of thereby converting the absurdity into spirituality. That is why it is so futile to attempt to distinguish what is rational and what is irrational in a society. To be sure, the role, the place, and the part one has in a society, and from which one inherits in terms of the laws of social reproduction, impel the libido to invest a given socius as a full body—a given absurd power in which we participate, or have the chance to participate, under the cover of aims and interests. The fact remains that there exists a disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power, and of the degree of development in and for themselves. Even in the person who has an interest—and loves them besides with a form of love other than that of his interest. This is also the case for the person who has no interest, and who substitutes the force of a strange love for this counterinvestment. Flows that run on the porous full body of a socius—these are the object of desire, higher than all the aims. It will never flow too much, it will never break or code enough—and in that very way! Oh how beautiful the machine is! The officer of “In the Penal Colony” demonstrates what an intense libidinal investment of a machine can be, a machine that is not only technical but social, and through which desire desires its own repression.

So simple. One desires production, one desires to exercise wills to power; one desires, in short, to live. But one can desire a living death, one can desire hatred for all that lives, all that enjoys; resentment. And the person who desires punishment, even for themselves, is not necessarily deceived as to their “real” interest; they can know perfectly well what they are doing, camps, trenches, the lot, and derive from it the satisfaction of a job well done. Sobering. However, it is important to hold in one’s heart that the difference between the Revolutionary and the Fascist is not the difference between Plato’s souls of gold and of bronze, it is not a question of essence or evil:

[W]hy do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary investment? Must we invoke in the one case a thirst for justice, a just ideological position, as well as a correct and just view; and in the other case a blindness, the result of an ideological deception or mystification? Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty. Here as elsewhere, the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the real problems, which are always of an organizational nature.

The task of the revolutionary is to organize desiring production. Simple as.

Another aspect of this insight concerns the Party, the Revolution, and how what appears at the level of interest to be a revolutionary desire may in fact be the opposite, and vice versa:

[W]e have not at all minimized the importance of preconscious investments of class or interest, which are based in the infrastructure itself. But we attach all the more importance to them as they are the index in the infrastructure of a libidinal investment of another nature, and that can coincide as well as clash with them. Which is merely a way to pose the question, “How can the revolution be betrayed?"—once it has been said that betrayals don’t wait their turn, but are there from the very start (the maintenance of paranoiac unconscious investments in revolutionary groups). And if we put forward desire as a revolutionary agency, it is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations of interest, but not one manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at the kindergarten level. We believe in desire as in the irrational of every form of rationality, and not because it is a lack, a thirst, or an aspiration, but because it is the production of desire: desire that produces—real-desire, or the real in itself.

Here, and throughout the selections above, we see that it is not a case, as I had previously understood, of a “spontaneous” or “unconscious” revolution, a sudden waking up which will throw off capitalism, but of engineering unconscious investments which are of the same nature as the objective interests, but at a different level (or “regime”: in the sense of a rate of flow). The revolutionary makes no distinction in priority between either, but pushes, pulls and tweaks the entire machine toward revolutionary desire, toward freedom.

Conclusion and note on “virtual comprehension”⌗

Doubtless I have said little with too many words, and absolutely nothing that could be called new. I have made my peace with that dragon Originality; what use have multiplicities for such things. Nevertheless, if you have somehow read this far, I hope you’ve found this interesting and entertaining, and that you will be inspired to produce your own understanding, without the comfort of knowing in advance where it will lead.

A curious thing I have observed, which I could not find a place for above: the schizophrenic character of our online landscape seems to promise us a knowledge which is virtual, a kind of prosthetic memory. This “virtual understanding” is contained not in a subject presumed to know, but “out there” somewhere, ours yet not ours; cyberspace seems to make us a strange promise that by training the algorithms, all alone in our isolated command centers, we can know everything, provided we know it only in extension, via association, and without the hard kernel of difference that a genuine other confronts us with. A bad reading of this text could (and did, for me) lend itself to this yearning to short-circuit understanding. But no, the virtual is not magic; understanding is difficult, takes time, and can’t happen in isolation. We need a milieu, we need difference which we cannot simply mute, we need to take up a concrete position, develop, and defend it. Understanding is difficult, slow, and painful, especially in a catatonically overstimulating age. Find a way.